Bobby Valentine to be named Sacred Heart University AD

Feb. 22, 2013
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This Oct. 1, 2012 file photo shows Boston Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine gesturing as he talks to reporters on the field before their baseball game against the New York Yankees at Yankee Stadium in New York. / Kathy Willens / AP

by Ted Berg, USA TODAY Sports

by Ted Berg, USA TODAY Sports

Former major league manager Bobby Valentine will continue to diversify his resume when he becomes Sacred Heart University's new athletics director. According to a report in the Connecticut Post, Valentine will be named successor to retiring AD Don Cook on Tuesday.

Baseball fans might best know Valentine from his stints managing the Texas Rangers, New York Mets and Boston Red Sox in the majors and the Chiba Lotte Marines of Japan's Nippon Professional Baseball League, or from his work as a baseball analyst for ESPN from 2009 to 2010.

But Valentine's interests have never been limited to baseball. Since 1980, he has owned and operated an eponymous sports bar in his hometown of Stamford, Conn., where he maintains he invented the wrap sandwich even though reports of meats being wrapped in flatbread date back to Hillel the Elder more than 2,000 years ago.

Valentine's 2012 campaign with the Red Sox was marked by tumult. The manager clashed with several of his star players and coaches as injuries and ineffectiveness kept Boston in the basement of the American League East for most of the season. His rocky tenure was punctuated by an October bike accident suffered while texting with second baseman Dustin Pedroia on a rainy morning in New York's Central Park.

Here's hoping for Valentine's sake and the sake of Sacred Heart's student-athletes that his new job goes a bit more smoothly than his last one did. Though texting while riding a bike in the rain certainly sets a bad example for America's youth, Valentine has succeeded in various pursuits in the past and is known to be a man of many faces.

Sacred Heart boasts 31 Division 1 sports teams, including a baseball team that has appeared in the Northeast Conference's championship game for the past four seasons, winning the last two.

The school's board of trustees includes politician and professional wrestling executive (and occasional professional wrestler) Linda McMahon, meaning Valentine's newest foray is practically begging to end in a steel-cage match at a forthcoming Wrestlemania.